


Haste

by ushauz



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, Pre-The Iron Bull/Dorian Pavus, Time Magic, a collection of headcanons posing as a fanfic, even brief speed powers are op
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-16 01:56:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28698792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ushauz/pseuds/ushauz
Summary: In which the Iron Bull is scared of blood magic but honestly would take the blood magic any day of the week if it meant Dorian stopped mucking around withtime magic.
Relationships: The Iron Bull & Dorian Pavus
Comments: 22
Kudos: 72





	Haste

The first time the Iron Bull met Dorian, it was in a Chantry. He warned Trevelyan, but he wasn’t particularly surprised that if there was a rogue Vint, it’d be that Pavus kid. All magisters and alti were watched by the Ben-Hassrath, but Dorian was someone allied with political powers looking to make Tevinter not suck as much, so of course he was watched in particular.

It wasn’t like he had the dossier committed to memory, so he made a mental note to ask back home to send over the contents.

The thing was, despite his training, despite everything he’d seen on Seheron, there were actually times the Iron Bull forgot. Not all the way, but some of the way. He got used to the creepy magic being blood magic, which was very creepy indeed. It fucked things up, and it could control people, warp minds, and the Iron Bull was privately terrified at the idea that someone could change his mind for him.

(A healthy fear of the reeducators, no matter the good work they did, was also understandable. He’d gone in, and he’d come out different. Mostly for the better, which is what he wanted, but still.)

So creepy blood magic was what the Iron Bull had been watching out for.

The second meeting, they confronted Alexius, who threw the boss and Dorian through some kind of portal. The group got very upset about this, but then just as the blades were being drawn, another portal appeared, and Trevelyan and Dorian exited.

They were more disheveled, had dust on their robes, and a few minor injuries. Trevelyan was holding her wrist gingerly and had half of her face bruised and bleeding slightly. Dorian had a few gashes in his robes with splatters of blood, and at first, that’s what the Iron Bull focused on. Some mages got really clever with making injuries not look self-inflicted.

And then three demons and his own upper torso _also_ rolled out of the portal.

“Shit!” Dorian said succinctly, and did some magic and closed the portal. This did not get rid of the demons, nor did it get rid of _the Iron Bull’s dead corpse._

It took a lot to stun the Iron Bull, he felt like. He’d been around. He’d survived Seheron and all its magisters. He’d seen things. But he’d never seen his own dead body before, and other him didn’t look great, and had weird red crystals poking out of his skin.

They killed the demons and apprehended Alexius who didn’t quite manage to escape in the chaos but had made a half-hearted attempt.

And then Iron Bull decided to address the dead body in the room.

“What the fuck?” the Iron Bull asked, pointing at his own corpse.

He felt he had a point.

“Nothing to worry about,” Dorian said, flashing him a smile.

“You can’t tell me that!” the Iron Bull said, voice maybe a bit louder.

“We were in the future,” Trevelyan said. “And now we are here again. Today has been a lot, and I’m going drinking.”

The Iron Bull stared at Dorian.

“It’s not that complicated,” Dorian said, rolling his eyes. “ _You’re_ fine. A future version of you died, but the current you is okay! And frankly, that’s all that really matters.”

He didn’t like unknown elements, not one bit. Why couldn’t Dorian have just been a normal creepy blood mage?

—

Dorian went to lengths to paint himself as ‘basically harmless’. He smiled, and only showed his magic when he was purposefully showing off his magic—or killing people. Sure, Dorian breathed magic, but small things. A quick heating spell there to get the soup or tea the right temperature, a whisper of healing across bruised knuckles. Small things. Harmless things.

He tried to make it so, so easy to forget that Tevinter bred for magic, and bred for smarts, and Dorian was one of the smartest ones who practically bled magic. The Iron Bull would know because he combed through the updated dossier, and oh yeah, Dorian was one of the mad Vints who tried to do time magic. Apparently he just succeeded where no one else did aside from Alexius.

Dorian was layers of charm wrapped around self-preservation, even as he complained loudly about everything he could find.

As if he didn’t _want_ people to know he’d survived two years running around in the South and hadn’t gotten murdered yet. It’d be useful for Trevelyan to know, but Dorian had his image to maintain. Part of that image was a pampered noble who had never known a day of hardship in his life.

(Which took a while around the _why,_ but Dorian seemed to not know what the fuck to do when someone cared about him. The solution, it seemed, was to while charming people, have them also not care about him. Self-defeating, but some people seemed set on tearing themselves down.)

The first time it happened was in Crestwood. They were fighting through a fort—vicious work, and hard to keep his mind on this fort and not other forts—when some large ringleader with a maul swung straight down on the Inquisitor’s body.

The Iron Bull didn’t get there in time. Nobody could have.

But that was about to happen, and then the man who had been about to murder Trevelyan was lying on the ground, the blade end of Dorian’s staff through his throat.

Dorian had been on the _other side of the battlements._

“You alright?” Dorian asked Trevelyan, and to be fair, he sounded winded.

Trevelyan pulled herself onto her feet. “That was close. And weird, but thanks.” And then she promptly stabbed someone who had been creeping up on them.

The battle was finished quickly after that, but fear had sunk into the Iron Bull’s bones, because he’d forgotten, somehow, again! Briefly, he hadn’t fully appreciated what a mage of Dorian’s caliber could do, even after seeing Dorian step through a portal in time.

Because that was one thing, something abstract, and Dorian had talked on and on about the limitations of moving through time itself. But time magic wasn’t limited to just portals apparently.

Sure, if the Iron Bull was able to sneak up on Dorian, that’d be one thing. But if Dorian saw the Iron Bull coming, it’d be no contest.

Dorian could kill him before the Iron Bull could even draw a blade.

—

As time wore on, Dorian used his speed powers—”it’s time magic, Bull”—on a few more occasions.

(His ‘Haste’ was a different ‘Haste’ than practiced by most mages, which used healing magic to pump vitality through a body, like an adrenaline rush. People moved and acted faster, but within the limitations of their body.)

Once, when archers had them in an ambush, Dorian simply slit all their throats with the blade end of his staff before they had time to react.

Oh he complained later, made up a huge show on how that was ‘all his magic for the day’ and he was tapped out now and was going to retreat to his tent and drink. As if Dorian, a Tevinter mage, didn’t well enough have other ways of casting magic if he _really_ was completely out of mana.

(Not that the spell wasn’t obviously taxing on Dorian; it was, clearly, but whenever Dorian did anything he thought might be a bit too much—lightning or fire or creepy undead minions—he immediately downplayed what he was doing to make himself seem more safe.)

Another time, when one of the Venatori Dorian had wanted dead made the mistake of running, well. Even with all that Fadestepping magic, he couldn’t get out of Dorian’s range, because, as it turned out, Dorian could also cast magic when he was fucking with time, enough to Fadestep himself and get within killing range.

“Of course I have to be able to cast magic while maintaining time magic,” Dorian explained to Trevelyan after. “For example, maintaining a strong barrier on myself when I’m moving around when slowing down time. You have to have a barrier because bodies aren’t meant to move at certain speeds, and I rather fancy having my internal organs as they are and not in a soup.”

And then he smiled, winningly, and soothed over Trevelyan’s fears.

Another time he stopped a crumbling bit of mountain from crushing Blackwall and himself. They _both_ moved at a speed almost unseen, and then were simply out of the way.

“You owe me a drink for that,” Dorian offhandedly mentioned.

“You can bend time around other people as well?” Trevelyan asked.

“Yes, but it’s harder,” Dorian said. “The more people, the more magic it takes, so either I need a lot more magic, or the effects aren’t as strong.”

There was a touch of excitement in his voice, that someone had asked. The Iron Bull noted that as a way to get into Dorian’s good graces. Habit. It was practical to be in everyone’s good graces when working together as a team, and if people liked you, they let more slip.

“Well I’m not buying you a drink,” Blackwall said. “We are all saving each other constantly, and besides, if I buy you one now, you’ll remember it, and then you will be constantly ‘saving’ me and harassing me for drinks.”

“Obviously,” Dorian said.

The Iron Bull’s heart was racing, and he was focusing on keeping his breath steady, but still he said, “I’ll buy you one for him.”

Dorian gave him a suspicious look but then relented. “Very well. At least there’s one gentleman here.”

There was one day that had gone from battle to battle to battle when Dorian overdid it and ended up coughing up blood for minutes afterward. The Iron Bull had passed him a healing potion and noted carefully when it did actually work. So at the very least his creepy speed powers weren’t being fueled by creepy blood magic.

And, again, Dorian’s charm wore on the Iron Bull. Or perhaps, chipping away at that charm. Seeing what lay underneath.

For all that Dorian claimed to favor self-preservation, he was out there with them, risking death to aid the Inquisition. He risked death at the start, being a Vint when they were fighting Vints. And even if he could find a way back home someday, even if the Tevinter government officially wanted nothing to do with the Venatori, this would forever be a massive stain on anything he could get done.

—

“So I’ve been thinking,” Sera was saying. “I’ve got some new grenades-”

“The last thing we need on the battlefield is stinging insects,” Trevelyan said curtly.

There was the briefest flicker of hurt over Sera’s face before she rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue.

There was a longer glint of danger in Dorian’s eyes directed at Trevelyan, one of the few times the Iron Bull had seen Dorian give that look to her.

“So I was _thinking,_ ” Sera said more loudly, “that I’ve got some new grenades, that go boom. A design the old Warden had that Friends found. Really effective, so, you gotta be careful using them since you can blow yourself up. Point is, Dorian, next time you go really fast, yeah, you could set them off like you do with your fire picture traps but with explosives. Save you on magic or whatever.”

The Iron Bull couldn’t count how many times the Tal-Vashoth either managed to steal gaatlok or recruit someone whose role had been to make it. There were areas in Seheron you could not travel without blowing yourself up, because the Tal-Vashoth found out a way to combine gaatlok and fire runes for a horrifying combination. It even worked buried just a few inches under the earth, so you could step on perfectly normal earth and then be blown to bits.

Sera had been talking further, and the Iron Bull had missed it. He breathed out, smelled the world around him, leather and iron and sweat and weeds. Cold, drier air, not hot and soupy. The ache in his leg, in his eyesocket, in his fingers.

“That could be very deadly,” Dorian said. “Sounds more time-effective than me manually slitting throats.”

“Can you get away fast enough?” Trevelyan asked. “It’s not effective if you get yourself blown up.”

Dorian waved a hand. “I can, it just takes _more._ The more I slow down time around me, the more magic that requires. I normally don’t slow things down that far as it is costly, and I don’t like feeling that weak after, but I _can_ do it.”

Something about that statement pinged _something_ in the Iron Bull’s brain, beyond growing terror and a healthy appreciation of the magical skills of the man he worked with.

“Point is, they are my grenades,” Sera said. “So if you use them, they count as my kills.”

And it wasn’t that the Iron Bull couldn’t see what she was doing. She and Dorian were practically kadan to each other. She was making efforts to accept Dorian’s creepy magic in stride.

But it scared the shit out of him.

—

That night, the Iron Bull tried to work out his aching muscles in his leg. The brace had gotten just ever so out of alignment when a bandit had tackled him, and he would need Stitches to get that fixed.

“I’d knock on the door, but you don’t have one,” Dorian’s voice came from his tent flap.

The Iron Bull let the fear roll off his shoulders and a friendly expression appear on his face.

“You can come in,” the Iron Bull said.

Dorian entered dramatically, and then looked around. “Well. Nowhere to sit except on the dirt. Fine. Dirt it is. This is how low I’ve sunk in life that people can’t even figure out what chairs are for.”

Despite himself, a genuine smile tugged on the Iron Bull’s lips. “You want to haul around chairs for sitting, then be my guest. Can I help you?”

Dorian hesitated, some of that peacock veneer falling off of him. “So ultimately, I decided that doing time magic to myself is hard enough. I don’t want to have to muddle about with keeping up time dilation around thrown objects as well. It’ll be too taxing, and I already give so much to the Inquisition.”

Bullshit.

“You noticed I was freaked,” the Iron Bull said.

“Well, you were a bit obvious,” Dorian said. “Normally you aren’t. Seemed if you couldn’t keep it off your face, it was something really bad. I am not entirely sure why, but I can’t imagine it’s a pleasant story.”

“It’s not,” the Iron Bull said. He hesitated for a moment, because this was _sweet._ Aww, Dorian did care! “But it’s a good enough plan, if you can work around it. You could maybe just drop the grenade, let it hang in time, and do it that way instead of forcing time to also alter around you _and_ the grenades. If it’s effective you should use it.”

“You’ve actually been paying attention to my descriptions!” Dorian said enthusiastically. “But really Bull. I- counter point, if it unnerves you greatly, then it’s not really that effective is it? I’ve- had to learn a lot, in the Inquisition. I knew fully well how to kill people before, but there’s also killing people and not freaking out your companions in the process. If the tactics are so disturbing as to render your compatriots ineffective in battle, then really there’s probably better things you could be doing.”

“I hear that,” the Iron Bull said. “But maybe it’s not so bad for the people around you to get comfortable with you. Raising the dead? Scary as shit. Very effective, especially when you don’t give it away and they go for the ankles. That’s great. I can chop off their heads when they are on the ground.”

“Cassandra hates that.”

“She’ll get used to it,” the Iron Bull said. “Like I’ll get used to it. The moment surprised me, but if I know that’s a tactic you have, I can work around that mentally.”

He hesitated for a moment. “You shouldn’t let someone’s opinions of you affect how effective you are in battle.” Because it seemed sad, in a way, Dorian making himself less. And, it was something the Iron Bull didn’t ask of his Chargers. He worked _with_ Rocky’s explosives and Dalish’s ‘archery’. The ‘archery’ spooked him, but it was damn useful. The explosives were also reminiscent of Seheron, but again, useful when handled correctly, and the Iron Bull could work with him.

Sure Rocky was still limited by the normal speeds people could work, and Dorian wasn’t, but still.

“I- have to?” Dorian said. “I _am_ a mage in the South. Historically if mages in the South start doing magic that’s too unsettling, people just lop off their heads. Not saying people around here would, but I’m not saying they wouldn’t either. I don’t know, and thus it seems prudent to not push it more than I already have.”

The Iron Bull quietly wondered if maybe that’s why Dorian hadn’t done any _special_ magic, the kind a mage could do when they were out of lyrium. He had to know it. He had lived and breathed Tevinter. Mages targeted each other’s magic in Tevinter first in duels, almost always. To survive a duel in Tevinter almost required special magic, and Dorian had done his fair share of dueling.

“Still. This was gallant of you to try to protect my feelings, and I appreciate it Dorian,” the Iron Bull said.

Dorian sniffed. “I was simply trying to be courteous.”

—

In time, the Iron Bull grew more used to his scary teammate. At some point the delicate tipping balance between ‘charmed’ and ‘afraid’ began to be more ‘charmed’, which morphed fear into, well, something else.

He called it ‘the dragon effect’.

Trevelyan didn’t take along Dorian to the Storm Coast because she ‘didn’t want a major diplomatic incident on her hands’. Despite that, she ended with, well, a major diplomatic incident on her hands, when she read the Iron Bull’s face and saw- something.

He should feel guilty. He should feel awful. He didn’t. He hadn’t realized how much he had dreaded the idea of returning to home until that option had been taken from him.

His people were his. His thoughts were his. Nothing could take them from him anymore.

Dorian provided wine and a sympathetic ear when he missed home though, as long as he got to wax poetic about the things he missed from his own homeland. Those nights became a habit, and the habit ended up in a weird friendship that, you know, maybe. The Iron Bull’s door was open, and Dorian had noted the door was open, and who knows what the future could bring?

And honestly, there were enough things in hindsight, the Iron Bull should have been able to figure it out earlier. Tactics Dorian would use, the magic that he’d known then, his sheer absolute hatred of the corruption of his homeland.

“Still missing home?” the Iron Bull asked one night.

“Always,” Dorian said, and he meant it.

“I hear there’s actually been less assassinations attempts going on,” the Iron Bull said. “Most of the high profile players are down here.”

“Yes,” Dorian said enthusiastically. “I do enjoy murdering my countrymen. It’s so nice of them to come down here and make it easy for me.”

“Mhm,” the Iron Bull said. “Of course, this is your first time, right. You’ve never killed your countrymen before in Tevinter.”

Dorian sighed, exasperatedly, and gave him a look. “How about you just tell me whatever is going on in that large skull of yours instead of us dancing around the subject.”

“Well, the Qun likes to know when major political figures die. Keeping up to date with politics is important. And, wouldn’t you know, there were a few strange assassinations that happened several years ago.”

“Of course there were,” Dorian said. “It’s Tevinter. People get creative. My favorite is when your rival decides to blood magic your friends into stabbing you.”

“Yeah, but there was this one guy. Winetaster tasted the cup, didn’t die. Gave it to the magister. He drank it, and then shortly after, died. That was weird. There was also this other time, a magister just. Fell off a balcony. Seemed like he was pushed, but nobody was nearby when it happened, but weirdly someone had put on a glyph of neutralization onto his robes, which ate through his barriers and made for sure he died. This third guy, his horse just spooked and trampled him to death, in front of the people he was traveling with. The horse calmed down immediately after the magister died, and they killed the horse to rule out a possession, which, turns out, the horse wasn’t actually possessed. Weirdest thing. A few others like that, over a few years.”

“People get creative,” Dorian repeated.

“Yeah, they do. Especially when there’s a real asshole in power, right?”

Dorian sighed, again, dramatically. “You are presuming these incidents were me.”

“Of course I am!” the Iron Bull said jovially. “I’m not judging.”

“What are you presuming my motivation was?” Dorian asked. “Evil men in Tevinter are not born; they are made. Just killing off a few wouldn’t change anything.

“True, you can’t kill off corruption like that; it won’t work,” the Iron Bull said. “So, presumably, you wouldn’t do it often. But, say. If you had the opportunity, right there in front of you, with magic you’ve been researching—not enough to turn back time, doesn’t work like that before the Breach—but enough magic to just give you a single moment of freedom, and if the magister was a truly vile person, then maybe you would. Not about reformation, about basic comeuppance. The idea evil people shouldn’t get to prosper. And that’s the thing; the few handful of mysterious strange deaths all happened to some really nasty people.”

The Iron Bull took a swig. “Thedas was better off without them, right?”

Dorian gave him a very calculated look, but said nothing.

“I’m not Ben-Hassrath anymore,” the Iron Bull pointed out. “This is just between friends.”

And it was, just between friends, no angle, and that was strange and different. And they were friends. Weird friend to have, but one the Iron Bull genuinely enjoyed.

“It’s exhausting,” Dorian finally said, “knowing if you kill someone truly vile, someone else as equally horrid will pop back up. But- you never know. Maybe an apprentice was just slightly less horrid. And, yes, you aren’t wrong, the idea that if you are _that_ wicked surely there must be some comeuppance, and it’s not like the courts will do that; magisters own the courts. I hated it, which Father never understood. He wanted me to make polite pleasantries with some of the vilest men in Thedas and shake their hands. I didn’t want to make polite pleasantries. I wanted them _dead._ ”

Dorian drank a little at that. “Well, some of them ended up dead. A happy coincidence, I shall say. Perhaps a bit of a pity more of them couldn’t die, but then oh wait, a lot of the worst moved down to the South in the name of Tevinter supremacy, and now I get to kill them much more easily. And with friends, too!”

“Again, I’m not judging,” the Iron Bull said. “I was Ben-Hassrath. I may have had my own times I had to get creative with taking out a major player in Seheron. Most of those I still stand by even.”

“I’d… prefer if you didn’t tell anyone,” Dorian said, and that was an admittance. “I’d rather people not find out.”

“I wasn’t going to tell anyone,” the Iron Bull said. “I just wanted to let you know I have a, hm, great respect for your talents.”

Dorian gave him a smile. “Well. You are perfectly safe with me.”

The Iron Bull believed it.


End file.
